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To (mis)crib from Professor McGonagall’s rallying cry: “Piertotum Locomotor! Dobby’s grave is threatened!”
A £430 million (€502m) over-and-undersea cable project between Britain and Ireland has been rerouted after Harry Potter fans discovered the original plan would have disturbed a shrine to the fictional character Dobby the House Elf.
The 190km-Greenlink high-voltage cable, to supply energy from Britain to Ireland, was supposed to be laid between County Wexford in Ireland and Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales. It’s on that beach where Dobby’s death scene in Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part One (2010) was filmed.
Since then, the beach has become popular with fans, who erected a shrine to Dobby and started leaving painted stones and socks as a tribute to the fallen hero.
The National Trust – Europe’s largest conservation charity – agreed the shrine could remain in place in 2022, but had urged fans not to leave socks behind for environmental reasons.
When learning that the Greenlink project would go through Dobby’s memorial, fans revolted.
In an interview on The Energy Revolution podcast released last Wednesday, Simon Ludlam, chief executive of advisory firm Etchea Energy, explained how the plans led to “hundreds of calls” from furious Harry Potter fans.
“He is a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing’s fictitious, what are you talking about?” Ludlam asked one of his colleagues, who informed him about the outcry and who insisted that the matter was “very, very serious”.
“So we got back with the planners and discussed exactly how to reroute the cable so we wouldn’t go anymore into Dobby’s grave,” Ludlam explained. “And a lot of people were very happy about that and, you know, the project’s now going and Dobby’s happy.”
The project went live in 2025 and can now power 380,000 homes. Without desecrating Dobby’s grave. Wands down.